The present invention relates to test program preparation methods and, more specifically, to a method for generating a test program used to test compilers under development.
Programs written in high level language are converted to executable forms by compilers. In the development of a compiler, test programs are prepared in order to verify its functions. Conventionally, such a test program is manually prepared by the designer of the compiler or an expert familiar with the language specification.
On the other hand, some approaches have also been proposed aimed at automatic generation of a test program by a computer. One of them is to select rules from prepared plural syntax generation rules by means of random numbers and generates a test program based on the selected rules as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 1-220044. Another approach is to check the grammatical coverage of an existing test program, output the non-covered grammars as a reduced set of grammars and automatically generate an additional test program based on the reduced set of grammars as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 3-75840. In still another approach, statement patterns are generated based on syntactic rules described in the Backus Naur form and the generated statement patterns are manually edited into a test program as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 6-214775.
Any of these automatic test program generation methods automatically generate single statements in a test program.